Publishing is a difficult business under the best of circumstances. Margins are small, it’s difficult to know what will sell, and even relative blockbusters are unlikely to provide long-term security against downturns.

Publishing is even more difficult when you’re not doing it strictly as a business, when you have a mission not necessarily rooted in profit and loss, but are instead oriented around bringing otherwise unknown or previously hidden knowledge into the public domain.

This is the work of university presses, and this work is under threat. For sure, I am biased. My story collection “Tough Day for the Army” was published by an imprint under the Louisiana State University Press banner, and I’ll have another book coming out with Johns Hopkins University Press this year. My main concern, though, is the harm the decline of university presses will do to the overall publishing ecosystem.

Some of the trouble is rooted in the shifting nature of the academic book market. The scholarly “monograph,” a close academic study often produced to fulfill one of the requirements of tenure, is almost invariably a money-losing proposition, once (but no longer) propped up by guaranteed library sales. As library budgets shrink, even as the publishing requirements for tenure increase, this particular cycle breaks down.

Some threats are more direct.

The University Press of Kentucky — located at the University of Kentucky but serving all of the state’s public institutions (plus some private ones) — has been directly targeted for elimination through budget cuts proposed by Gov. Matt Bevin, according to Inside Higher Ed. While the press funds operations with revenue from its books, the salaries of its staff are part of state appropriations.

The press focuses on the Civil War and books about Appalachia, but also publishes fiction, including Rion Amilcar Scott’s story collection “Insurrections,” which last year won the prestigious PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. It’s an award usually dominated by commercial presses, such as Knopf and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

A world without the University Press of Kentucky is a world where Scott’s book may never have come into existence.

SIU Press is an important publisher of scholarship on both Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant as well as an outlet for contemporary poetry, which would cease to exist as a viable area of academic study without university presses.

NIU Press has been home to Switchgrass, a fiction imprint that consistently produces compelling books about the Midwest, including at least one book I consider a bona fide classic: “Butter” by Anne Panning, a 1970s coming-of-age tale set in Minnesota.

Perhaps some are against public or state money supporting this kind of work. Perhaps they think that if something has to be subsidized, it isn’t worth maintaining. But consider:

At the time it was declared “nonessential,” NIU Press was receiving $320,000 in institutional funding. Meanwhile, the NIU athletic department receives more than $17 million per year in subsidies split between institutional funding and student fees. More than 60 percent of athletic department funds come via subsidies.

A well-published academic volume or collection of short stories may not be as attention-grabbing as a trip to a bowl game, but we’re also talking literal pocket change when it comes to the funding these presses need to continue to do their excellent work.

Biblioracle John Warner tells readers what to pick up next based on their last five books. Click through to see who's reading what. Want a reading from the Biblioracle? Send a list of your last five reads to books@chicagotribune.com. Write “Biblioracle” in the subject line.

Columnist John Warner offers his picks for great reads of the year — so far — including "The Italian Teacher" by Tom Rachman, "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou, "The Overstory" by Richard Powers, "Sunburn" by Laura Lippman, "Red Clocks" by Leni Zumas, and "Just the Funny Parts" by Nell Scovell.